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From a foodie standpoint, Passover can be an epicurean disaster: rock-dense “matzo bagels,” unfortunate noodle-free lasagnas and, sadly, even the beloved
matzo-brei
, a riff on French toast, can get cold and old after eight straight days.

But for me, there is one culinary standout in this long, breadless holiday: matzo ball soup.

It’s a dish that doesn’t disappoint — at Monday’s first Passover seder or any time of year.

As a child, I would guzzle it by the bowl-full in front of
The Muppet Show
, gulping down the spongy spheres of matzo meal and egg. In university, the rich, warm broth and hearty
knaidlach
brought me back to life after a night out.

As a mom, I proudly serve this dish to my children. Almost daily.

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More than just a soup, it’s Jewish soul food. The best part is that it’s easy to prepare.

In her soup-making years, my Bubbie Magda, 93, was a whirlwind in the kitchen, a flurry of tosses, chops, kneads and flips. Watching her cook was like chasing a hurricane: exciting, challenging, possibly dangerous.

When it came to figuring out the soup, thankfully, it turned out to be as simple as throwing together a few fresh ingredients. Whenever I visited my grandparents’ home, it seemed, there was always a large, aluminum pot bubbling with steam and brimming with fresh, simmering soup on her busy stovetop. Or there was about to be.

Her soup recipe, like many bubbies’, is a mash-up: part hardy Polish heritage; part tried, true and well-loved recipe in
Second Helpings Please!
— the
Jewish mother’s cooking bible
.

While some bubbies use turnips or parsnips to bolster their broth, like the
SHP
recipe suggests, my Bubbie Magda is a parsley root purist. That’s the only vegetable, aside from carrots, celery and onion, of course, she tosses in, scrubbed, peeled and otherwise whole.

Instead of relying only on chicken bones, she uses the whole chicken — bone in, skin on, meat intact; either a regular bird or a “soup” chicken, one that is older and more flavourful. And not only one, but at least one and a half plump birds.

No one could ever say the chicken ran through my bubbie’s soup in rubber boots! she would joke, long before her charm was stolen by Alzheimer’s.

She added one more, rather odd ingredient to her recipe. When I ask for “flanken” these days, most butchers just stare and say they’re unfamiliar with that part of a cow.

There are many secrets to a good chicken soup. Cookbook author Rose Reisman doesn’t use beef in her version, she says, but bolsters the taste with the vegetables already in it. When it’s cooked and done, Reisman wraps up the turnips and parsnips into a cheesecloth or J-Cloth.

“The trick is to take those soft, mushy vegetables and squeeze as hard as I can,” she says, “to get out all the moisture back into the soup.”

That’s after three hours of a good, steady simmer.

I would sit at my bubbie’s white Formica kitchen table, eat my butter-fried chicken fingers and watch her spoon off the greyish bubbles that rose to the surface of the hulking, hot pot. In between skimmings is when she tossed the matzo meal, egg, oil and salt into a bowl.

While most others put their matzo ball dough into the fridge to rest and grow lighter, for airy, cloudlike spheres, my bubbie didn’t have that kind of time to spare. She’d scoop out spoonfuls as is and toss them into a smaller pot of soup from a separate, premade batch, and boil them in the broth for 30 minutes.

I didn’t realize, until I whipped up my own matzo balls years later, that they’re supposed to swim, rather than sink like baseball-sized stones. My bubbie’s version was still tasty, of course, and nobody’s perfect!

For the last 15 minutes of soup cooking, my bubbie would crank up the heat, my mom says, and add fresh parsley and dill — for an herby lightness that would also perfume the kitchen.

The smell would tickle my nose even the next morning if I was still around to observe my Bubbie scooping off the soup’s layer of thick, white schmaltz that developed after hours in the refrigerator overtop the clear, cooled soup.

Back in the day, my Bubbie told me, it was a treat to spread it on bread!

We may skip that artery-clogging tradition at our home today, but my kids devour matzo ball soup — I serve them hot bowls of clear broth with a few good spheres plopped in — year round. They love it, even though they’re too young to know of how it binds them to many generations before them.

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